Panoramic cameras that image a wide area up to three hundred and sixty degrees (360°) have proven to be very useful in conference room situations, where all participants in a meeting can be imaged by a single photographic device. Resolution for panoramic images (e.g. 1056×144) differs from standard streaming video resolution (e.g. 352×288) that is utilized by most existing video conferencing systems. Simply transmitting a panoramic image in standard resolution does not provide a rich user experience.
If the panorama is resized to fit in a standard video stream but maintain the correct aspect ratio, the faces of meeting participants will appear too small to be practically useful once the panorama has been resized (e.g. to 352×48). If the panorama is cropped to fit in a standard video window, a majority of a display of the video stream is unused.